A world in which computers take up entire rooms; in which
"cell" refers to elements in biology experiments, not
phones; in which shag carpet and short-sleeved polyester dress
shirts are proper office decorum--are we talking about some strange
alien colony? No, just the United States of 1977.

While looking 20 years into the past can be amusing, looking 20
years into the future fills many
with trepidation. Indeed, the ungraspable, overwhelming nature of
the future has a way of reducing even top futurists to putty,
leading them to spout statements such as "The future
hasn't happened yet," "The future will not be like
the past," and "Things will be the same, but
different."

"The most useful knowledge we can have is knowledge about
the future," says Wendell Bell, professor emeritus of
sociology at Yale University and a pioneer of the modern futurist
industry. "To make our way in the world, [we] have to make
some assumptions about what the future will be and how to adapt to
it." With that in mind, we asked some of the nation's top
futurists to share their predictions for tomorrow.

Small Business Lifts Off

"The concepts driving us today have been obsolete for the
past 50 years," says Watts Wacker, resident futurist at SRI
Consulting, a Westport, Connecticut, marketing and business
consulting firm. "The concept of reengineering without
renewing your vision only means you get more efficient at doing the
wrong stuff. It's time for a complete reconnecting, reinventing
and redefining of the fundamental role of business."

Wacker sees a transition into an entirely new era.
"It's a culture in which intellectual property is going to
be more important than materials," he explains.

Meanwhile, the economy itself is on the brink of a 200-year
shift, says David Birch, founder of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based
economic research firm Cognetics Inc. According to Birch, "[We
have entered a] knowledge-based economy, as opposed to the
industrial economy, which we entered around 1810, and the
agricultural economy that we entered 200 years before that. In this
shift, the things that matter are not railroads and harbors and
boats and steel and coal and oil, but knowledge. And the smaller
firm is much more competitive in a knowledge-based economy than in
an industrial economy because the cost of producing knowledge is
very low."

We are already seeing the signs of these transitions; by the
year 2017, futurists predict we will see the fruition of
life-changing trends. Medical technology may lead to a life span of
150 years; global cooperation may lead to American businesses not
just exporting but emigrating to other countries; niche marketing
may lead to each individual becoming his or her own small
business.

It will be a totally different world, says Birch--and small
businesses will have no small part in it. "The large companies
are, for the most part, gradually dying, and the ones replacing
them, the Gateway 2000s and the ASTs and the Dells, will never even
come near the size of the IBMs and the Digitals before them,"
Birch observes. "We aren't creating any more Exxons. The
maximum size for a company will be much smaller. And we'll see
a constant wellspring of new seeds being sown and old plants
dying."

"This is the beginning of the end of big," concurs
Faith Popcorn, author of Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your
Life, Your Work, and Your Business (HarperCollins). "Even
big companies, to survive, must know how to behave `small.'
"

The rise of entrepreneurial companies will strengthen the U.S.
economy as a whole, believes Birch, who likens the effect to the
runway at the Kennedy Space Center. "They originally built a
concrete runway along which a big tractor transported the space
vehicles to the launch pad," he explains. "But they only
got the missiles a few feet out before they realized it
wouldn't work. The runway couldn't adjust; the missiles
started to sway back and forth and eventually would have fallen
over. They had to tear out the concrete and put down a bed of
pebbles instead. So the tractor goes along and crushes all the
pebbles, but the system is very stable. That's what our economy
is like. The concrete runway is like a collection of Fortune 500
companies, a system that caused the stock market crash in 1929 and
the huge drop in the Dow in 1987. Building the economy on the backs
of a whole series of [small] companies ensures those events
[won't reoccur]. Small businesses are like millions of little
pebbles, the collection of which is very stable."

No Time Like The Future

That small business will dominate the future seems a fairly firm
prediction, but envisioning the environment in which they will
reign is a little more complex. Major issues include the maturing
of the global market, the shrinking pool of qualified workers, even
the lengthening of life itself--significant considerations for
entrepreneurs, who are notorious for their shortsightedness.

To help you start preparing for the long term, here are some top
futurists' predictions for the year 2017:

*Longer life spans. Somewhere around 2020, Americans over
the age of 65 will outnumber those under the age of 13. By the year
2030, Americans over 65 will total 69 million--almost double the
number today. And, though by the year 2005 the number of Americans
aged 100 years or older will be only slightly more than 100,000,
futurists believe we'll soon live to be 150. "These will
not be years of infirmity," says Bell, "but of vigorous,
active middle age."

This dramatic change will affect the market, the labor force and
businesses themselves. "There will be all kinds of
opportunities, including the provision of new products and
services, especially those having to do with lifetime education,
personal satisfaction or self-enrichment," says Bell.

Regarding labor, Bell sees "the length of human life as a
tremendous opportunity. Older workers tend to be more dependable
and reliable than younger workers, more likely to show up for work
every day, on time, and stay all day."

Even the face of businesses should mature, as business owners
reap the benefits of more productive years and alter their
companies' structures accordingly. "I see an increase in
wisdom in the world because as people get older, their priorities
change and their understanding of the world changes," says
Bell. "Status and upward mobility matter less, and being a
decent person matters more."

*The next generation of entrepreneurs. Today's youth have a
few strikes against them--one of which, Birch contends, is the
educational system. "It's the most backward part of
American society today," he says, citing the slowness with
which change in the system occurs.

Gerald Celente, founder of The Trends Research Institute and
author of Trends 2000 (Warner), has dubbed the younger
siblings of Generation Xers "hippies 2000" and is
optimistic that they'll overcome more than the educational
system. "They will be the new revolutionaries," Celente
contends. "Instead of boomers, who protested against
Washington and the Pentagon, these children are going to protest
against corporations, greed and materialism."

Young entrepreneurs will be "developing products and
services with compassionate capitalism," says Celente,
"which means they'll promote social responsibility and
produce genuine quality-of-life items without plundering the
earth."

This generation will "bring us away from the
one-dimensional philosophy of the industrial age, which relates to
finance," Celente adds. "People are going to realize they
have a greater purpose in life than
just economic gain. They'll be not just taking, but
giving."

*Labor force. "The number-one problem facing small
businesses today is the lack of a skilled work force," says
Birch. By most entrepreneurs' standards, finding qualified
workers is already a problem; by 2017, the labor shortage may be
even more extreme. "Any time I run an ad [for a job opening]
on the Internet, a quarter of the people who respond are from
China," says Birch. "We have a global labor force now,
and they're very talented, but I can't hire them because of
anti-immigration legislation."

If the government maintains its regulations against immigrants,
Birch expects a drastic change: More U.S. businesses will consider
picking up and moving overseas. "The big difference between
now and 20 years ago is that businesses can do that more
easily," says Birch.

*International relations. The need to hire from an
international talent pool won't be the only change spurring
entrepreneurs to go global. "Twenty years from now, there will
be a global middle class of such enormous size that we can't
even imagine what it's going to mean," says Wacker, who
estimates this market will reach 3 billion by 2017.

Besides the growing middle class, the hot market overseas will
be women. In fact, Bell considers the worldwide liberation of women
one of the most significant events of the next 20 years. "In
most of the world today, women are not liberated; they are not
living lives of their own choice," he says. "When they
do, there are going to be tremendous opportunities to provide
products and services for their needs, wants and hopes."

No matter how you slice the global market, you come up fruitful.
"Today, a small business can do a deal with China and be off
and running, and dominate the Asian market in that product or
service. You couldn't do that 20 years ago," says Birch.
"It used to be only the top 200 firms exported. Now 96 percent
of all exporters are considered small businesses. And their share
of dollar value is going up quickly. The trend of a tiny company
becoming a global player has really only just begun."

In fact, by all accounts, the global market is where the serious
players will be. "We're only 5 percent of the world's
population, for heaven's sake," says Birch.
"China's growing 9, 10 percent a year. If we can get out
from this wall we live behind and get out there, this trend
represents enormous opportunity."

*World peace. Yes, even world peace is on the agenda for
entrepreneurs in 2017. "There is a move toward a global ethic,
the spread of concern for human beings everywhere on the
earth," says Bell. "The business world is central [to
this movement] in many ways. Transnational corporations are
responding to opportunities all over the world. All businesses have
a stake in creating sustainable development, a world in which
everyone is included."

With small businesses picking their employees, their customers
and their business partners from overseas, global cooperation may
be within reach. "The good news is that it's probably the
best form of world peace known to man," says Birch. "If
we're all investing in and trading with each other, we're
certainly not going to shoot each other."

Best Face Forward

If you find the burden of world peace a little overwhelming,
consider the idea that although personal computers, fax machines,
modems and the Internet have made doing business easier and more
efficient, the technological advances of the past 20 years are
nothing compared with what the future holds. "The impact of
the computer really hasn't been felt yet, and that's
probably something that will happen in the next 20 years,"
says Birch.

Yet even the most powerful technological innovations will not in
themselves bring about the good or prevent the bad. As Celente
points out, the telegraph was expected to revolutionize the world,
but it didn't prevent the Civil War. The advent of radio and
movies changed the way we communicate, but it did nothing to
prevent two World Wars. The introduction of television certainly
has done nothing to prevent violence on the American streets or the
dissolution of the American family. And we all know the computer
revolution has not by any means decreased our workload.

"Yes, the digital revolution is a major trend. Yes,
it's changing the way we live and work," says Celente.
"But it's not more powerful than ideologies. It's just
a tool, a means to an end. This stuff is only a technology.
It's when ideas change and people change and what's being
communicated changes--that's when things really
change."

Perhaps it is entrepreneurs who are best suited to face the
future. "Some people look at problems and pull their hair and
moan. And others say `This is a problem, and I can turn it around
and make it into an opportunity,' " says Bell. "A
problem almost always [presents] an opportunity, if someone has the
imagination and the lateral thinking to see it."

Take comfort, too, in knowing that in reality, the future comes
on gradually, so intertwined with our everyday existence that
grasping the concept is easier than it seems. Herein lies the key
to putting the future in perspective. The future will happen in
spite of us; it's not ours to control. And while we can attempt
to anticipate and manipulate time, we certainly don't have the
power to regulate it. "Regardless of what technology comes up
with," says Celente, "there will still be only 24 hours
in the day."